Dell PowerEdge R740xd Review — Gen 14 2U 32-Drive Storage Server
The 2U Platform for Massive Data Repositories, NAS, HCI, and Storage-Dense Compute
Data-Intensive Analytics and Data Lakes — Up to 32 hot-plug drive bays across front, mid, and rear positions deliver raw storage density for petabyte-scale HDFS clusters, Apache Spark data lake nodes, and Cloudera CDH analytics pools where every terabyte counts toward total cluster capacity within a constrained rack footprint
Backup and Archive Repositories — Up to 12 × 3.5-inch 16 TB NL-SAS or SATA drives (192 TB raw front capacity) plus mid and rear 3.5-inch bays enable ultra-dense Veeam, Commvault, or Veritas NetBackup target repositories in 2U for replacing aging tape silos or spinning-disk backup appliances with high-density disk-based backup
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) — Dell EMC VxRail and VMware vSAN ReadyNode configurations for R740xd pair the 24-bay 2.5-inch SFF chassis with M.2 BOSS boot, all-flash NVMe tiers, and H740P RAID for high-density vSAN All-Flash or hybrid clusters where per-node raw capacity is the primary sizing driver
NAS and File Server Gateways — The SAS expander backplane with 12 × 3.5-inch front plus mid and rear drives provides 276 TB or more in a single 2U NAS gateway running Windows Server DFS-N, Samba, or Dell EMC Isilon NAS protocols for unstructured data repository workloads
Database Servers with Large Sequential I/O — Up to 24 × 2.5-inch NVMe SSDs in the 32-drive chassis deliver sequential throughput for MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle database servers where read-intensive ad hoc query workloads benefit from NVMe latency without requiring external all-flash arrays on a separate enclosure
Surveillance and Video Analytics — High raw capacity combined with NL-SAS 7.2K drives provides cost-effective long-term video retention for multi-camera surveillance systems; NVMe hybrid configurations accelerate real-time AI-based video analytics workloads requiring low-latency access to recently ingested video streams
Content Delivery and Media Asset Management — Mixed SAS/NVMe configurations with large LRDIMM or DCPMM memory tiers serve as high-capacity media asset management platforms for broadcast, streaming, and post-production workflows requiring high sustained throughput with immediate hot-file access to large video assets
Dual 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable — Up to 28 Cores Per Socket
2nd Gen Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake-SP) — Dual LGA 3647 sockets supporting the full Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum lineup of the 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable family; flagship Xeon Platinum 8280 delivers 28 cores per socket at 2.7 GHz and 205 W TDP — the highest single-socket compute density in the Gen 14 XD platform
Up to 56 Cores Total — Dual Platinum 8280 configuration yields 56 cores and 112 threads across both sockets for parallel workloads that benefit from high thread counts, such as Hadoop YARN compute nodes, batch processing engines, and multi-threaded compression or transcoding pipelines
Intel C620 Chipset (PCH) — Platform Controller Hub provides PCIe 3.0 uplinks, xHCI USB 3.0, integrated SATA 6 Gbps with AHCI and RAID, ACPI 4.0 power management, Intel TXT, Intel AMT, VT-d, and Rapid Storage Technology Enterprise for a comprehensive Gen 14 enterprise I/O baseline
Intel UPI up to 11.2 GT/s — Up to three Intel Ultra Path Interconnect links between CPU sockets replace QPI from the prior generation; UPI's cache-coherent NUMA traffic paths maintain inter-socket bandwidth headroom for storage-intensive I/O workloads reading and writing across both NUMA nodes simultaneously
48 PCIe Gen 3 Lanes Per CPU — 96 total PCIe 3.0 lanes across both sockets feed the R740xd's 8-slot PCIe expansion riser configuration, SAS expander, rNDC, and PERC slot concurrently without link saturation — essential for configurations combining NVMe drives, InfiniBand HCAs, and GPU cards
Intel AVX-512 and Deep Learning Boost — AVX-512 FMA instructions accelerate compression, encryption, and floating-point workloads common in large-scale data pipelines; VNNI (Vector Neural Network Instructions) enables INT8 AI inference inside the CPU for lightweight models without GPU offload overhead
Single-Socket Supported — The R740xd supports single-CPU operation in Socket 1 with required CPU2 memory blanks and processor blank for thermal compliance; Riser 1 plus Riser 2B remain active in single-CPU configurations — suitable for entry-level pure-storage deployments
24-Slot DDR4 — Up to 1.5 TB LRDIMM, 7.68 TB with DCPMM, 192 GB NVDIMM-N
24 DDR4 DIMM Slots — Twelve slots per CPU in six channels (two DIMMs per channel); all 24 slots active in dual-processor configurations for maximum aggregate memory bandwidth across all twelve memory channels — necessary for sustained high-bandwidth sequential I/O in NVMe storage and analytics workloads
Up to 1.5 TB LRDIMM (Native DDR4) — 24 × 64 GB quad-rank LRDIMMs use the load-reduction buffer to present a single memory load per channel, enabling 1.5 TB peak DDR4 capacity; 64 GB LRDIMM configuration is the standard maximum memory tier for R740xd deployments not requiring DCPMM
Up to 3 TB RDIMM — 24 × 128 GB LRDIMMs achieve the absolute 3 TB maximum DDR4 capacity for memory-bound analytics, in-memory databases, and virtualization platforms not using persistent memory modules
Up to 7.68 TB with DCPMM + LRDIMM — 12 × Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory 512 GB DIMMs combined with 12 × 64 GB LRDIMMs (one DCPMM + one DRAM per channel) reach 7.68 TB total addressable memory for SAP HANA scale-up, Oracle Database In-Memory, and in-memory NoSQL deployments in a single chassis
Intel Optane DCPMM Modes — Memory Mode uses all DRAM as a transparent cache layer for DCPMM capacity and requires no application changes; App Direct Mode exposes DCPMM as byte-addressable persistent memory visible to PMem-aware applications with full data persistence across planned and unplanned power loss events
NVDIMM-N — Up to 192 GB Battery-Backed Persistent DRAM — Up to 12 × 16 GB NVDIMM-N modules (192 GB total) store DRAM contents to integrated NAND on power loss using the onboard supercapacitor battery; NVDIMM-N battery mounts to the air shroud or mid drive tray for R740xd configurations with mid-bay storage populated
Advanced RAS: Mirroring, Sparing, Dell FRM — Memory Mirroring duplicates writes across channel pairs for transparent hot failover; Single and Multi-Rank Sparing pre-allocates spare ranks for online error correction; Dell Fault Resilient Memory (FRM) creates protected zones for VMware ESXi hypervisor kernel isolation
Up to 24 × 2.5-Inch or 12 × 3.5-Inch Front Hot-Swap Drive Bays
24 × 2.5-Inch SFF Front Chassis — Max 184 TB — Full 24-bay 2.5-inch SFF front backplane supports up to 24 hot-plug SAS/SATA/NVMe drives; maximum raw capacity of 184 TB using 7.68 TB 2.5-inch SAS SSDs (e.g., 24 × 7.68 TB) for all-flash or mixed flash deployments; the 24-bay chassis is required for GPU configurations
12 × 3.5-Inch LFF Front Chassis — Max 192 TB — Twelve large-form-factor hot-plug SAS/SATA bays supporting drives up to 16 TB each (192 TB at 12 × 16 TB); peak raw storage capacity in the R740xd for bulk SATA and NL-SAS data repository deployments requiring minimal cost per terabyte over maximum IOPS
Universal Slots for SAS, SATA, and NVMe — The 24-bay SFF chassis supports configuring slots 12–23 as Universal slots where SAS/SATA hard drives, SSDs, and NVMe PCIe SSDs coexist in the same backplane — enabling mixed tiered storage with SAS HDD + SAS SSD + NVMe in a single front-accessible backplane
NVMe PCIe SSDs — Up to 24 in 24-Bay Chassis — Express Flash NVMe SSDs connect CPU-direct (no bridge card) in 24-bay SFF configurations for sub-100 µs latency reads; available NVMe capacities include PM1735a (1.6/3.2/6.4 TB) and PM1733a (1.92/3.8/7.6/15.36 TB) 2.5-inch options for extreme throughput tiers
SAS 12 Gbps SFF Drive Sizes — 2.5-inch SAS 10K (300 GB–2.4 TB), SAS 15K (300–900 GB), SAS SSD (400 GB–7.68 TB), and SATA SSD (120 GB–3.84 TB); all drives are hot-plug and accessible without powering down the chassis or removing other drives in adjacent bays
SAS 12 Gbps LFF Drive Sizes — 3.5-inch SATA 7.2K (1 TB–16 TB) and SAS NL 7.2K (1–8 TB) with SED FIPS variants; 3.5-inch drives in the 12-bay chassis are hot-plug with LED activity and status indicators; hybrid 2.5-in-3.5-inch adapter carriers available for mixed-size populations
SAS Expander for Full Drive Count — The R740xd uses an on-board SAS expander to concatenate front, mid, and rear backplanes onto a single PERC controller connection; the SAS expander enables RAID volume sets spanning drives across the front and mid bays simultaneously for maximum RAID set size
Exclusive Mid-Bay Tray and Rear Drive Cage — Up to 8 Additional Bays in 2U
Mid-Bay Drive Tray — Up to 4 × 2.5-Inch or 4 × 3.5-Inch — The R740xd's internal mid-bay tray installs between the front backplane and the PCIe risers, adding up to 4 × 2.5-inch SAS/SSD (max 30.72 TB) or up to 4 × 3.5-inch SAS/SATA drives (max 64 TB) — entirely absent from the standard R740 platform
Rear Drive Cage — Up to 4 × 2.5-Inch or 2 × 3.5-Inch — The rear-accessible drive cage at the back of the chassis (visible from the PCIe card side) adds up to 4 × 2.5-inch SAS/SSD drives (max 30.72 TB) or 2 × 3.5-inch SAS/SATA HDDs (max 32 TB), providing hot-swap access from the rear panel without opening the chassis cover
Maximum 32-Drive Configuration — The fully populated R740xd achieves up to 32 drives: 24 × 2.5-inch SFF front + 4 × 2.5-inch mid + 4 × 2.5-inch rear drives for a raw capacity of 245.76 TB (24+4+4 × 7.68 TB SAS SSD) or 18-drive 3.5-inch configurations: 12 × 3.5-inch front + 4 × 3.5-inch mid + 2 × 3.5-inch rear
Mid-Bay Hybrid 2.5-Inch in 3.5-Inch Carrier — The mid-bay tray supports 3.5-inch drive carriers with 2.5-in-3.5-inch hybrid adapters, enabling 2.5-inch SAS SSDs or SAS 10K drives in the 3.5-inch mid-bay slots for configurations that need high-performance SSD tier at mid-bay position without additional 2.5-inch backplane
NVDIMM-N Battery on Mid-Bay Tray — In configurations where the mid-bay tray is populated, the NVDIMM-N battery module mounts to the side of the mid-bay tray assembly rather than the air shroud; configurations with both mid-bay drives and NVDIMM-Ns require careful component placement review per the R740xd service manual
Rear Cage PCIe Slot Constraint — Installing the 4 × 2.5-inch or 2 × 3.5-inch rear drive cage consumes the rear panel space behind PCIe Slot 6 (LP/HL); Riser configuration must account for rear storage presence — 3-riser expansion configurations (e.g., 1A+2A+3A) are incompatible with rear drive cage installation
Thermal Restrictions for Mid + Rear Bays — Mid-bay configurations require high-performance heat sinks and six high-performance fans replacing the standard four-fan configuration; ambient temperature limits are reduced to 30°C or 25°C depending on CPU TDP when mid and rear bays are populated with drives
PERC H740P, H730P, HBA330, HBA350i, BOSS, S140, and External H840
PERC H740P (Recommended for R740xd) — 12 Gbps SAS/SATA hardware RAID with 8 GB NV cache for RAID 0/1/5/6/10/50/60; the H740P is the preferred controller for the R740xd as it handles the full SAS expander-connected multi-backplane topology spanning front, mid, and rear bays across a single SAS domain
PERC H730P — 12 Gbps hardware RAID with 2 GB NV cache for RAID 0/1/5/6/10/50/60; suitable for front-only 24-bay or 12-bay configurations where full-expander domain management from the H740P NV cache is not required; H730P mini-mono installs in the dedicated PERC slot on the system board
HBA350i (R740xd Internal Non-RAID) — Internal 12 Gbps SAS HBA for JBOD pass-through to software-defined storage platforms (Ceph, Gluster) and hypervisors requiring direct block access to all R740xd local drives without a hardware RAID abstraction layer; HBA350i is available as mini-mono for the dedicated R740xd PERC slot
HBA330 (Internal Non-RAID) — Non-RAID SAS HBA mini-mono for pass-through JBOD configurations where software RAID or SDS platforms such as Red Hat Ceph manage the full drive domain across the SAS expander; HBA330 provides single SAS domain visibility of all connected bays without RAID overhead
H750 Adapter — Full-height PCIe adapter version of RAID for deployments where a second independent RAID domain is required alongside the built-in PERC mini-mono slot, or where the dedicated slot is occupied by another function; H750 connects to SAS backplane via cable rather than the internal PERC slot
S140 Software RAID — Intel chipset-assisted software RAID 0/1/5/10 on SATA and NVMe drives for entry configurations without a hardware PERC controller; CPU-based RAID processing adds overhead but eliminates PERC cost and eliminates a potential hardware failure point for front-only configurations with lighter I/O loads
BOSS + PERC H740P Together — BOSS card's dedicated PCIe slot is separate from the PERC slot; R740xd can run BOSS M.2 SATA RAID 1 for OS boot independently alongside H740P managing all SAS/SATA data drives — no trade-off between boot storage and workload storage in fully equipped configurations
Up to 3 × 300 W Double-Width GPUs — Available on the 24-Bay SFF Chassis Only
24-Bay SFF Chassis Required for GPU — GPU and FPGA accelerator options are available exclusively on the 24 × 2.5-inch front drive chassis of the R740xd; the 12 × 3.5-inch LFF chassis does not support GPU or FPGA cards — a key planning constraint for customers selecting between the two front chassis configurations
Up to 3 × Double-Width 300 W GPUs — Three full-height full-length double-slot 300 W GPU cards (e.g., NVIDIA A30, Tesla T4, or Quadro RTX) in the 24-bay SFF chassis for AI inference acceleration, GPU-powered analytics, and computational fluid dynamics workloads alongside dense SFF NVMe storage
Up to 6 × Single-Width 150 W GPUs — Six single-slot 150 W GPU cards (e.g., NVIDIA T4) in the 24-bay SFF chassis for VDI hosting, video transcoding pipelines, and AI inference farms where per-GPU cost efficiency and slot density outweigh single-card peak throughput
NVMe Drive Count Limits GPU Count — In the 24-bay SFF chassis with NVMe drives in universal slots 12–23, PCIe lane resources shared between NVMe backplane and GPU risers reduce maximum GPU count to 2; full 3-GPU configurations require SAS/SATA drives without NVMe universal slot population
FPGA Accelerator Support — Up to 3 × double-width or 4 × single-width FPGA cards supported in the 24-bay SFF chassis for hardware-accelerated packet processing, encryption offload, and domain-specific algorithm acceleration alongside the full 24-drive SFF storage capacity
PCIe Gen 3 x16 GPU Slots — Each GPU installs in a full-height full-length PCIe Gen 3 x16 slot directly connected to a Xeon Scalable processor for maximum GPU-to-CPU bandwidth; GPU riser selections 2A and 3A provide the full-height slots needed for double-width GPU form factors
Validated 2U GPU Thermal Envelope — The R740xd GPU thermal design validates six high-performance fans with GPU air shroud at 30°C ambient for GPU-equipped 24-bay configurations; reduced to 25°C for high-TDP CPU (>165 W) and GPU configurations combined — verified in Dell R740xd thermal certification
Up to 8 PCIe Gen 3 Slots — Six Riser Configurations for Flexible Expansion
Up to 8 PCIe Gen 3 Slots — Maximum configuration (Riser Config 4: 1A+2A+3A) delivers 8 PCIe Gen 3 slots with up to 4 × x16 links; Riser Config 5 (1B+2A+3A) provides 8 slots of mixed x8/x16 for configurations requiring more x8 cards alongside x16 GPU or InfiniBand adapters
Riser Config 0 — No PCIe Expansion — R740xd supports a no-riser PCIe configuration with rear drive bays but no general-purpose PCIe cards; useful when all I/O is handled by the rNDC and mini-PERC controller without any additional expansion cards
Riser Config 1 (1B+2B) — Four x8 Slots — Slots 1/2/3 (FH/FL x8 each, CPU1) + Slot 4 (LP/HL x8, CPU2); supports rear drive bays; optimal for deployments needing three CPU1-connected cards plus one LP card with rear storage bay compatibility preserved
Riser Config 3 (1A+2A) — Five Slots, x16 Available — Slots 1 (FH/FL x16) + 3 (FH/HL x16) from Riser 1A; Slots 4 (FH/FL x16) + 5 (FH/FL x8) + 6 (LP/HL x8) from Riser 2A; no Riser 3 — maximum for configurations requiring GPU or FH cards from both CPU1 and CPU2 while retaining rear storage compatible PCIe rear handle
Riser Config 4 (1A+2A+3A) — Eight Slots Maximum — Adds Slots 7 (FH/FL x8) and 8 (FH/FL x16) from Riser 3A on CPU2; full 8-slot configuration for maximum PCIe expansion density; not compatible with rear drive cage installation when Riser 3 occupies the rear-panel position
Riser Config 5 (1B+2A+3A) — Six x8, Two x16 — Riser 1B (Slots 1/2/3 at x8) + Riser 2A (Slots 4/5 at x16/x8, Slot 6 LP) + Riser 3A (Slots 7/8 at x8/x16); best balance of x8 and x16 slots for configurations mixing InfiniBand/25GbE NICs with GPU cards across both CPU domains
Riser Config 6 (1D+2A+3A) — Five x8, Three x16 — Riser 1D (Slot 1 FH/FL x16, Slot 2 FH/FL x8, Slot 3 FH/HL x8) + Riser 2A + Riser 3A; one x16 on CPU1 plus two x16 on CPU2 for configurations where CPU2 holds dual GPU cards and CPU1 holds one HBA or NIC alongside the CPU1 x16 slot
rNDC Up to 2 × 25GbE — iDRAC9 Dedicated 1GbE Management Port
4 × 1GbE rNDC — Four-port 1 Gigabit Ethernet NDC for standard management and host access; occupies the NCE slot without consuming any general-purpose PCIe expansion slot — freeing all 8 PCIe slots for SAS HBAs, GPU cards, or additional NIC add-in cards
2 × 10GbE + 2 × 1GbE rNDC — Mixed-speed card with two 10GbE (SFP+ or BaseT) uplinks for primary storage network traffic and two 1GbE ports for heartbeat, IPMI-over-LAN, and management VLAN isolation in two-tier data center network architectures
4 × 10GbE rNDC — Quad 10 Gigabit rNDC provides four 10GbE ports for hypervisor hosts combining iSCSI storage access, VM migration, and application network traffic on four separate logical paths without consuming any expansion PCIe slot
2 × 25GbE rNDC — Dual 25 Gigabit SFP28 rNDC for maximum built-in bandwidth; pairs with 25GbE leaf switches in spine-leaf fabrics used by NVMe-oF initiators, high-throughput analytics workloads, and S3-compatible object storage backends in the R740xd cluster node role
iDRAC9 Dedicated 1GbE Management NIC — Out-of-band management NIC on its own independent power plane — persistent through host OS power state changes; enables remote hardware monitoring, firmware updates, and KVM console access during OS crashes, network saturation events, and maintenance shutdowns
PCIe Add-In NIC and InfiniBand Options — Up to 8 PCIe NIC add-in cards supported; Mellanox ConnectX InfiniBand EDR (100 Gbps) and HDR (200 Gbps adaptors with PCIe 4.0 risers) for HPC MPI fabric; 25GbE RDMA (RoCE) adapters for NVMe over Fabrics storage fabrics connecting R740xd storage capacity to compute clusters
NIC Partitioning Support — 10GbE and 25GbE rNDC options support NPAR (NIC partitioning) presenting multiple logical network interface cards to the host OS with bandwidth guarantees per partition — enabling multi-tenant hypervisor traffic isolation without additional PCIe NIC slots
Hot-Plug Redundant PSUs — 495 W to 2000 W Platinum and Titanium
1+1 Hot-Plug Redundancy — Two hot-swappable PSU slots with 1+1 redundancy supported on all PSU tiers; PSU replacement is non-disruptive to running clusters and active drive rebuild operations — critical when dense storage configurations demand continuous write access during drive predictive failure replacement events
495 W Platinum — For light single-socket Silver/Bronze R740xd configurations with front-only drives and no GPU; 100–240 V AC auto-switching at 1908 BTU/hr for the highest-efficiency entry-level PSU option aligned with lowest-TDP server configurations
750 W Platinum and Titanium — Standard for mid-range dual-socket configurations with 12–24 front drives and no GPU; 750 W Titanium achieves 80 PLUS Titanium 94–96% efficiency for data center facilities tracking PUE and Watts-per-rack metrics across dense storage server rows
1100 W Platinum — For fully-populated 12-bay LFF or 24-bay SFF configurations with dual Platinum-class CPUs and all bays populated with spinning drives; 1100 W Mixed Mode HVDC variants available for 200–380 V DC infrastructure in China and Japan deployments
1600 W Platinum — Required for GPU-equipped 24-bay SFF configurations with one or two double-width 300 W GPU cards; also appropriate for 32-drive configurations (front + mid + rear) with dual high-TDP Xeon Scalable CPUs and highest-density drive populations
2000 W Platinum — Maximum PSU tier for the R740xd at 2000 W (7500 BTU/hr); designed for triple-GPU configurations on the 24-bay SFF chassis or maximum-density NVMe + GPU + dual 205 W Platinum CPU combinations requiring maximum PSU overhead for workload power bursting
DC and Mixed Mode Options — 1100 W Gold –48 V DC for telecommunications –48 V DC bus racks; 750 W Mixed Mode Platinum for 100–240 VAC and 240 VDC (China) racks; 1100 W Mixed Mode HVDC for 200–380 V DC bus environments in China and Japan data centers requiring DC-compatible UPS infrastructure
Up to 6 Hot-Plug N+1 High-Performance Fans — Configuration-Dependent Cooling
Standard Configuration — 4 Fans — Single-CPU R740xd without mid-bay drives uses four standard hot-plug fans with one blank covering the two unused fan slots; N+1 fan redundancy maintained with four-fan configuration for standard ambient temperature operation within the 10–35°C operating range
Mid-Bay and GPU Configurations — 6 High-Performance Fans — Any R740xd configuration with mid-bay drives, GPU cards, or dual high-TDP CPUs requires all six hot-plug high-performance fan slots populated; high-performance fans deliver the higher airflow volume required by the denser component thermal load of the mid-bay extended storage configurations
Standard 10–35°C Operating Range — Full feature support including all PSU tiers, GPU configurations, and SAS expander within the standard range; iDRAC9 Dell Active Power Control (DAPC) fan profile minimizes fan power consumption while maintaining all thermal margins throughout this range
Expanded Fresh Air Cooling 5–40°C — Continuous operation to 40°C with 5–85% RH for thermally compliant configurations; above 35°C the recommended inlet temperature, mid-bay configurations, high-TDP CPU tiers, and GPU-equipped configurations have specific de-rating limits — see the R740xd technical specifications supplement for ambient restriction tables
Reduced Ambient for Mid + Rear Bay Configs — Mid-bay configurations with CPUs above 125 W TDP require ambient inlet temperature below 30°C or 25°C (for CPUs above 150 W / 165 W TDP); expanded temperature restrictions explicitly prohibit mid-bay installation in the expanded temperature operating mode above 5°C cold startup
GPU Thermal Validation for R740xd — GPU air shroud required for GPU-equipped R740xd configurations; validated for 24-bay SFF chassis with up to 3 × 300 W GPUs at 30°C ambient with high-performance fans; PCIe SSD is not supported in expanded temperature mode regardless of other configuration factors
Open + Closed Loop Hybrid Fan Control — BOM-based open-loop tables set initial fan speeds at startup; closed-loop feedback from temperature sensors across CPU packages, DIMMs, PCH, GPU cards, drives, inlet, and exhaust continuously refines speed to the minimum value maintaining all thermal compliance margins
Dual Front USB 2.0, iDRAC Direct, VGA Front and Rear, USB 3.0 Rear
Front USB 2.0 × 2 — Two USB 2.0 ports on the right front control panel for OS installation media, field service diagnostic drives, and temporary USB storage access at the front of the 2U chassis without disconnecting rear cabling in a fully-wired rack installation
Optional Front USB 3.0 — A USB 3.0 internal port on the system board supports an optional front-panel USB 3.0 module; the USB 3.0 add-on provides SuperSpeed 5 Gbps access for larger OS installation ISO images and faster diagnostic data collection compared to USB 2.0
Front iDRAC Direct (Micro-AB USB) — Front-panel Micro-AB USB port with illuminated LED enables laptop-to-iDRAC9 direct connection without network infrastructure; the indicator LED lights blue when an active iDRAC Direct session is running — useful for initial node configuration and field service access in dense storage rows
Front VGA — 1 × 15-pin VGA port on the right front control panel for monitor access during POST, BIOS configuration, RAID controller setup, and OS installation at the rack face without routing cables to the rear panel through other servers in the same rack unit
Rear USB 3.0 × 2 — Two SuperSpeed USB 3.0 (5 Gbps) ports on the rear panel for external drives, KVM adapter dongles, long-term USB storage attachments, and external peripherals requiring persistent connection to the R740xd once it is operational in the rack
Rear VGA, Serial DB-9, and iDRAC NIC — 1 × rear VGA port for alternate console path; 1 × DB-9 serial connector for legacy serial console redirect through iDRAC9 Serial-over-LAN (SOL); 1 × iDRAC9 dedicated 1GbE RJ-45 port for completely isolated out-of-band management network segregation
No Optical Drive (R740xd) — The R740xd does not have an internal optical drive bay — unlike the R740 which supports an optional DVD-ROM or DVD+RW; OS and firmware installation must be performed via USB media, PXE network boot, iDRAC virtual media, Lifecycle Controller, or IDSDM/vFlash microSD image; plan for this constraint in provisioning workflows
Silicon Root of Trust, Signed Firmware, TPM 1.2/2.0, Secure Boot, and Secure Erase
Silicon Root of Trust — Factory-burned cryptographic identity burned into iDRAC9 silicon validates every firmware image in the boot chain before any host processor instruction executes; hardware-anchored trust is immune to software-layer attacks and firmware injection attempts targeting the pre-boot environment
Cryptographically Signed Firmware — Every firmware package in the R740xd — BIOS, iDRAC, PERC H740P/H730P, NDC, PSU management — carries a Dell-signed certificate chain; Lifecycle Controller validates signatures at installation time and rejects unsigned, modified, or counterfeit firmware packages
UEFI Secure Boot — EFI bootloader signature verification runs before any OS security stack initializes, preventing rootkit persistence, unauthorized OS loading, and pre-OS malware execution channels; mandatory for CIS benchmark Level 2 compliance on R740xd deployments in regulated environments
TPM 1.2 / 2.0 and TCM 2.0 (Optional) — Plugin TPM module provides hardware-rooted key storage for BitLocker volume encryption, vTPM for VMs, Intel TXT measured launch, platform identity attestation via iDRAC9 SupportAssist key generation, and compliance reporting; TCM 2.0 for China-specific TCCP regulatory requirements
System Lockdown (OpenManage Enterprise Required) — Policy-enforced firmware and hardware configuration lock prevents all BIOS, iDRAC, RACADM, WS-Man, and Lifecycle Controller changes until the lockdown token is revoked by an authorized administrator — eliminates unauthorized configuration drift at scale across R740xd storage fleets
System Erase (Secure Erase) — NIST 800-88-compliant cryptographic and multi-pass overwrite erase of all storage media: SAS/SATA HDDs, SSDs, NVMe PCIe SSDs, NVDIMM-N flash modules, IDSDM microSD cards, BOSS M.2 SSDs, and optionally volatile DRAM for complete evidence-free chassis decommissioning
Drive-Level Encryption (SED) — SAS and SATA Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) variants available with FIPS 140-2 certification for front, mid, and rear bay drives; PERC H740P controller manages SED key management through the Dell Key Management Server integration — enabling instant cryptographic drive sanitization without time-consuming overwrite passes
iDRAC9 with Lifecycle Controller, RESTful Redfish API, and Quick Sync 2
iDRAC9 Embedded Controller — Dedicated out-of-band management processor reports drive status, array health, fan speed, DIMM health, PSU status, and system power utilization to 1% accuracy at all times; manages all 32 potential drive bays and their backplane LEDs, SAS expander health, and PERC controller state simultaneously
Lifecycle Controller 3.x — Agent-free provisioning and firmware management running without any installed OS; drives OS deployment via PXE or iDRAC virtual media, firmware baseline comparison and update, RAID volume creation across all backplane bays, and hardware configuration for touch-free R740xd node provisioning
RESTful API with Redfish — DMTF Redfish 1.0 JSON REST API provides programmatic access to storage health, drive reporting, predictive failure alerts, RAID volume management, and power monitoring for fleet-scale R740xd management via Ansible, Terraform, or custom Python tooling without an OS-level agent
Quick Sync 2 Wireless Module (Optional) — BLE + Wi-Fi bezel enables iDRAC9 inventory, RACADM command push, and firmware staging via the OpenManage Mobile app on a smartphone at the front of the server — particularly valuable in dense storage rack rows where reaching the rear management NIC cable is restricted by adjacent cabling
OpenManage Enterprise — Centralized lifecycle management dashboard for discovery, health monitoring, automated firmware compliance baseline reporting, alert escalation, and power usage tracking across all R740xd fleet nodes; System Lockdown policy enforced through OpenManage Enterprise for change management compliance
Storage-Specific Management Features — iDRAC9 monitors predictive failure scores for all SAS/SATA/NVMe drives via S.M.A.R.T. data, tracks mid-bay and rear-bay NVDIMM-N battery charge state, reports SAS expander health, and issues proactive replacement alerts before drive failure impacts array availability
SupportAssist Embedded — Automated case creation and part dispatch on hardware failure detection; predictive drive failure AI scoring sends replacement requests to Dell Support before RAID rebuilds are triggered — minimizing the unprotected exposure window between initial drive failure and replacement part arrival
Windows Server, VMware ESXi, RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu LTS, Oracle Linux, and Citrix
VMware ESXi — vSAN ReadyNode Certified — VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide certified for vSAN All-Flash and Hybrid ReadyNode configurations; OMIVV for vCenter manages R740xd hardware health and firmware from within the vSphere web client; IDSDM provides the dedicated ESXi hypervisor boot microSD for OSA (OS on SD) deployment
Windows Server 2019 / 2016 LTSC with Hyper-V — Full Hyper-V host certification with Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) validated configurations for hyper-converged Windows clusters; iDRAC Service Module (iSM) provides Windows host-to-iDRAC health pass-through without an external management agent for Windows Server bare-metal deployments
Red Hat Enterprise Linux — Including OpenShift — RHEL 7 and 8 certified; RHEL for SAP HANA with DCPMM App Direct Mode for large in-memory SAP instances; OpenShift Container Platform bare-metal worker node support for storage-intensive containerized data platform deployments on R740xd node hardware
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) — SLES certified including SLES for SAP Applications with DCPMM; fully validated for Ceph software-defined storage cluster deployments using HBA330 or HBA350i pass-through mode across all R740xd drive bays presented as raw JBOD devices to the Ceph OSD process
Canonical Ubuntu Server LTS — Ubuntu LTS for OpenStack Cinder + Swift storage nodes, Ceph OSD nodes in pure-Ubuntu clusters, Kubernetes bare-metal persistent volume server nodes, and general Linux storage server deployments with long-term Canonical security patching support epochs
Oracle Linux — Oracle Linux UEK (Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel) certified for Oracle Database, Oracle RAC, and Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance software deployments on R740xd hardware with co-support qualification for Oracle premier support coverage on Dell PowerEdge Gen 14 certified platforms
Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer) — Citrix Hypervisor certification for VDI deployments on the 24-bay SFF GPU-equipped R740xd running NVIDIA T4 or A10 GPU in vGPU mode for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops hosted VDI with local NVMe storage for persistent desktops and GPU-accelerated graphics profiles
ReadyRails Sliding and Static — Weight up to 33.1 kg (73 lb) in 2U
ReadyRails Sliding (Drop-In) — Tool-less drop-in installation in 19-inch square or unthreaded round-hole racks; tooled for threaded racks; full-extension out of rack for DIMM replacement, drive bay servicing (front and mid), and PCIe card replacement without pulling the chassis; adjustment range 631–883 mm (square)
Stab-In / Drop-In Sliding (Gen 14 New) — New stab-in design required for Dell EMC Titan and Titan-D racks; supports 603–915 mm square, round, and threaded hole types; identical minimum depth requirements to standard sliding rails; preferred for mixed-vendor rack environments containing both Dell and third-party cabinets
Optional Cable Management Arm (CMA) — CMA attaches to the sliding rail rear bracket; keeps rear cable bundles for PSU, NDC, iDRAC, USB, and PCIe card external cables managed during full-extension service events; minimum depth with CMA: 845 mm — verify rack is 1000 mm deep minimum before specifying CMA
Static Rails — Stab-in 4-post and 2-post Telco rack support at 608–879 mm adjustment range; no full-extension servicing capability; no CMA compatibility; minimum rack depth 622 mm; lowest per-unit rack accessory cost for deployments where in-rack servicing is a lower priority than installation density
2U Chassis Profile — 86.8 mm (3.4") height in exactly two rack units; 715.5 mm depth including bezel (678.8 mm without bezel); 482.0 mm full-rack-width chassis; identical form factor to the R740 — same rail kits can be specified for both models in mixed-model rack installations
Weight — Up to 33.1 kg (72.91 lb) — Maximum populated weight for a 3.5-inch LFF configuration with all 12 bays filled plus mid and rear drives; 28.1 kg (61.95 lb) for 2.5-inch SFF fully populated configuration; two-person lift required for all R740xd chassis removal and re-rack operations per OSHA ergonomics guidelines
Rack Depth Planning — R740xd chassis depth of 678.8 mm plus rear drive cage depth and power cord bend radius requires rack internal depth of at least 900 mm for standard 1U PSU + rear drives; verify available rear panel clearance before ordering rear drive cage option in shallow-depth rack deployments
R740xd vs R730xd — More Drives, More PCIe, DCPMM, GPU Support, and iDRAC9
2nd Gen Xeon Scalable vs E5-2600 v3/v4 — Cascade Lake-SP replaces Broadwell/Haswell EP; 50% more memory channels per socket (6 vs 4), Intel UPI replacing QPI, AVX-512 for vectorized workloads targeting storage compression and dedup algorithms, DCPMM/NVDIMM support not available in any E5-2600 SKU, and Intel Deep Learning Boost for in-CPU inference
Up to 24 NVMe vs 4 PCIe Bridge SSDs — The R730xd supported up to 4 PCIe SSD cards in common slots via a PCIe bridge card; the R740xd supports up to 24 NVMe SSDs CPU-direct in the 24-bay SFF front backplane with no bridge card latency overhead — a 6× NVMe density improvement in identical 2U enclosure depth
GPU Support Added on R740xd — The R730xd did not support GPU or FPGA accelerators at all; the R740xd supports up to 3 × 300 W double-width or 6 × 150 W single-width GPUs plus FPGA cards on the 24-bay SFF chassis — enabling GPU-accelerated analytics on the storage-dense XD form factor for the first time in the product line
DCPMM and NVDIMM-N (New) — R740xd adds Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory (up to 6.14 TB at 12 × 512 GB) and NVDIMM-N (up to 192 GB at 12 × 16 GB) — both fully absent from the R730xd — opening SAP HANA In-Memory, Oracle IMO, key-value store, and large-column-store analytics workloads impossible on the prior generation
Up to 8 PCIe Slots vs 6–7 — R740xd supports up to 8 PCIe Gen 3 slots (4 × x16 max) vs the R730xd maximum of 7; all Gen 14 PCIe slots operate at PCIe Gen 3 vs mixed generations on some R730xd configurations; rNDC slot does not compete with PCIe general-purpose expansion in either generation
BOSS M.2 Boot Module (New) — R730xd required a front drive bay for OS boot from RAID; R740xd adds the BOSS card for dedicated M.2 SATA HWRAID 1 OS boot preserving all front bays for workload storage — especially impactful on the 12-bay LFF chassis where every 3.5-inch bay is critical for raw capacity
iDRAC9 vs iDRAC8 — iDRAC9 adds Silicon Root of Trust, Redfish RESTful API, Quick Sync 2 BLE/Wi-Fi, System Lockdown, System Erase including NVMe and NVDIMM, DCPMM persistent memory health monitoring, SupportAssist predictive failure AI, and multi-drive-bay health telemetry enhancements absent from iDRAC8
| Feature | R730xd (Gen 13) | R740xd (Gen 14) |
|---|---|---|
| Processor Family | Xeon E5-2600 v3 / v4 | 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake) |
| Memory Interconnect | Intel QPI | Intel UPI up to 11.2 GT/s |
| Max Front Drives (2.5") | Up to 24 × 2.5-inch | Up to 24 × 2.5-inch |
| Max Front Drives (3.5") | Up to 12 × 3.5-inch | Up to 12 × 3.5-inch |
| Mid-Bay Drives | 4 × 3.5-inch mid-bay | 4 × 2.5" or 4 × 3.5" (new options) |
| Max NVMe | 4 via PCIe bridge | Up to 24 CPU Direct Attach |
| GPU Support | Not supported | Up to 3 × 300 W or 6 × 150 W GPUs |
| Intel Optane DCPMM | Not supported | Up to 12 × 512 GB (6.14 TB) |
| BOSS M.2 Boot Module | Not supported | 2 × M.2 SATA 240/480 GB HWRAID 1 |
| Remote Management | iDRAC8 | iDRAC9 |
ProSupport Plus with SupportAssist and ProDeploy for R740xd Deployments
ProSupport Plus — Dell's highest-tier support plan covers all R740xd drives across front, mid, and rear bays; SupportAssist automated predictive failure scoring monitors all 32 potential drive bays and flags pre-failure drives for replacement dispatching before the RAID array enters degraded state
SupportAssist Embedded — Proactive and predictive support automation monitors drive S.M.A.R.T. data, SAS expander health, NVDIMM-N battery capacity, DCPMM health indicators, fan RPM trends, and PSU efficiency degradation — opening support cases and dispatching replacement hardware automatically without administrator intervention
ProSupport 24×7×365 — Certified hardware engineers with 4-hour mission-critical on-site parts and labor response for R740xd storage fleets where RAID rebuild exposure windows between drive failure detection and replacement part arrival must be bounded by contract SLO for compliance
ProSupport One for Data Center — Site-wide contract covering all R740xd storage nodes, R740 compute nodes, and Dell EMC PowerVault or PowerScale storage arrays under one support agreement with assigned Technical and Field Account Managers — simplifies vendor management across large mixed Gen 14 storage estates
ProDeploy Enterprise Suite — Certified Dell deployment engineers handle Physical Installation (Basic Deployment), OS deployment, RAID configuration across all bays, firmware baseline update, and initial monitoring agent installation (ProDeploy), or full environment assessment, migration planning, and knowledge transfer (ProDeploy Plus)
Residency Services — On-site Dell resident engineers for multi-week R740xd HCI cluster builds, vSAN ReadyNode All-Flash cluster commissioning, DCPMM SAP HANA scale-up configuration, Ceph OSD cluster deployment across JBOD pass-through R740xd nodes, and custom NVMe-oF fabric integration projects
TechDirect Self-Service Portal — Web-based portal for self-dispatching replacement drives and spare parts, technical case filing, API integration with internal ITSM ticketing systems, access to R740xd service manuals and firmware update catalogs, and Dell TechDirect certified technician training for in-house R740xd service teams
Frequently Asked Questions — Dell PowerEdge R740xd
The Dell PowerEdge R740xd supports up to 32 total drive bays across three positions. The front chassis offers up to 24 × 2.5-inch (max 184 TB) or 12 × 3.5-inch (max 192 TB) hot-plug drives. The mid-bay tray adds up to 4 × 2.5-inch or 4 × 3.5-inch drives, and the rear cage adds up to 4 × 2.5-inch or 2 × 3.5-inch drives. The maximum 32-drive configuration uses 24 front + 4 mid + 4 rear 2.5-inch bays. The related R740 model has front bays only: up to 16 × 2.5-inch or 8 × 3.5-inch. Configure your R740xd storage at ECS.
The R740xd (Extended Storage) adds a mid-bay drive tray (4 × 2.5" or 4 × 3.5") and a rear drive cage (4 × 2.5" or 2 × 3.5") to the standard R740 platform, enabling up to 32 total drives vs R740's maximum of 16. Both are 2U dual-socket. The R740xd does not support an internal optical drive, while the R740 does. Both share the same memory, processor, PCIe, and power supply options. The R740xd GPU option is limited to the 24-bay SFF chassis only. The R740xd also uses the HBA350i (not available on R740) as its internal non-RAID HBA option.
The Dell PowerEdge R740xd supports up to 1.5 TB DDR4 LRDIMM native (24 × 64 GB) or up to 3 TB DDR4 with 128 GB LRDIMMs across 24 DIMM slots. With Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory (DCPMM), total addressable memory reaches 7.68 TB (12 × 512 GB DCPMM + 12 × 64 GB LRDIMM). Up to 192 GB of NVDIMM-N battery-backed persistent memory is also supported. DDR4 speeds reach 2933 MT/s with 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable processors and 1 RDIMM per channel. All 24 slots require dual-processor configuration.
Yes, but only on the 24 × 2.5-inch SFF front drive chassis. The R740xd supports up to 3 × double-width 300 W GPUs or 6 × single-width 150 W GPUs on the SFF chassis. GPU is not available on the 12 × 3.5-inch LFF chassis. NVMe configurations sharing the 24-bay universal-slot backplane limit maximum GPU count to 2. FPGA accelerators (up to 3 × double-width or 4 × single-width) follow the same 24-bay SFF chassis requirement. GPU configurations also require high-performance fans, GPU air shroud, and a 1600 W or 2000 W PSU.
Yes. Express Computer Systems stocks professionally reconditioned refurbished Dell PowerEdge R740xd servers configured to your exact specifications — front bay chassis selection (24 × 2.5" or 12 × 3.5"), mid-bay and rear-bay options, processor tier, memory capacity, storage controllers, and networking. Whether you need a dense NVMe storage server, a 3.5-inch bulk capacity node, or a GPU-equipped analytics platform, ECS builds your R740xd to specification and ships it ready to deploy. Shop refurbished Dell R740xd servers at ECS.
Ready to Deploy the Dell PowerEdge R740xd?
Express Computer Systems offers professionally reconditioned Dell PowerEdge R740xd servers built to your exact configuration — 24-bay NVMe-ready, 12-bay bulk capacity, mid-bay extended storage, or GPU-equipped analytics nodes. Every unit is tested and ships ready to rack.
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